DETROIT – Playing their third game in four nights this was bound to happen to the Detroit Red Wings.

The Wings were outskated and outshot after 20 minutes of play as they fell once again on home ice, this time 2-1 to the lowly Florida Panthers, Saturday night at Joe Louis Arena.

“That’s no excuse,” Niklas Kronwall said when asked if it was a lack of energy that led to the loss to the Panthers. “We have to be a lot better hockey team than we showed. We need to play with a lot more desperation and execute in all situations. We made more mistakes than we have in a quite a few weeks now. It’s not good enough.”

This loss, which drops Detroit’s home record to 5-6-6, came a night after beating the New Jersey Devils on the road.

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“It’s terrible,” Daniel Cleary said of the team’s record at home.

“We stopped skating,” Kronwall said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the energy. I don’t know what it is. We have to be a lot more desperate and determined than that. We stopped skating and started watching hockey instead of playing.

“We’re not very happy with our game,” Kronwall continued. “We have to look ahead and stay positive. The execution level, just how we played, just wasn’t good enough.”

Cleary scored the Wings’ goal, while Jonas Gustavsson made 35 saves in suffering his first loss in regulation.

“We just didn’t skate like we had (any) energy,” Cleary said. “We weren’t skating off of the puck. Obviously we didn’t generate enough offense. They certainly took the play to us quite a bit but we were in the game, you know, right to the middle of the third. Just got to execute in D zone and obviously it’s a game that we want to get points out of.

“It’s not our first back-to-back,” Cleary added. “Mentally you just have to get through it. You’ve got to talk to yourself and listen, we didn’t have our legs early but we were still in the game and that’s the frustrating part about it. We were right there. Just got to execute a little bit better and we got a couple of power plays late that just not Red Wing-like. We were just missing passes and it didn’t look like we had a lot of sense of urgency.”

The Wings, who had outscored their last six opponents 24-11 coming in, were outshot 28-14 in the second and third periods combined.

“I thought it was lack of energy for sure,” Wings coach Mike Babcock said. “You try to fight through it the best you possibly can. We had a game last night and they sat in our building, hung out and waited for us. There’s no excuse for anything, you’ve got to find ways to win games.

“So the bottom line is the schedule-maker wasn’t friendly to us on this one,” Babcock continued. “To me that’s all excuses. You just got to find ways to win every night and we didn’t find a way tonight. And we rode good goaltending, too. He had real good saves.”

Florida got the game-winning goal early in the third period taking advantage of the Wings’ inability to clear the zone.

Huberdeau took a pass from Tom Gilbert and had seemingly all day in front of Gustavsson to shoot the puck before finally deciding on a backhand to put the Panthers ahead.

Detroit had two power play opportunities past the midway point of the third period, but could generate nothing.

“I thought we tried to paly simple,” Babcock said. “We lacked energy. If you want you can talk about our record at home. That to me is totally different than tonight. We didn’t have energy. We played last night, they had energy. We were going to try to grind it out like we did last night. We knew the game was going to be 2-1. We were just hoping the game was going to be 2-1 for us. The lineup we have right now is how we have to play.”

It was the third straight game Detroit has played without both Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg, dropping to 1-2-0. The Wings were also missing Darren Helm and Danny DeKeyser.

Datsyuk (concussion) is expected back when Detroit travels to Florida on Tuesday.

After a pretty lackluster opening power play for Detroit just over a minute into the game, Cleary put the Wings on the board moments later.

Justin Abdelkader gained the Panthers’ zone and took the original shot that Thomas got his right pad on. However, the rebound shot right out to Cleary and he buried his shot in the open net.

Cleary had gone 23 straight games without scoring, but did have two assists in that stretch.

The Panthers tied things up three minutes the second period.

Gustavsson thought he had the original shot near the side of the net by Shawn Matthias covered up, but Hayes found the loose puck just under the right pad of the Wings’ netminder to jam it home.

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